Audio ads will play every 15 minutes on the service, with a video ad every hour

Deals with the brands range from “the high single-digit millions of dollars to tens of millions of dollars,” according to sources cited by the advertising industry site AdAge.

Audio advertisements will run on the service at a rate of one every 15 minutes or so, with video ads playing roughly every hour, the report said. Advertising will feature across all Apple platforms, including iPhones, iPads, all computers loaded with iTunes, and Apple TV.

The video commercials will play at times when listeners are more likely to be looking at the screen, such as when they are skipping a track or after hitting play.

The current partners will have exclusivity within their respective industries until 2013, but slots will be opened up to other advertisers at the start of next year, with a reported minimum buy-in of one million dollars.

The cost of the individual ads will depend on the size of the screen they are displayed on, with Apple TV spaces costing the most and iPhone slots the least.

Users can avoid ads altogether if they purchase iTunes Match, a cloud-based storage feature that allows people to access their iTunes library via any device.

Apple has previously only said that the radio service would be released some time in the autumn.

It will initially be released in the US and there are currently no set plans to roll out the service to the rest of the world. The company’s senior vice president Eddy Cue said that Apple would be “adding other companies over time” when the project was announced.

iTunes Radio will not allow users to chose individual songs or albums on demand – like streaming services such as Spotify and Deezer – but will instead offer users the chance to ‘curate’ their own stations based on their preferred artists, songs or genres.

In this respect it is most like the US-based ‘personal radio’ service Pandora, which reached 71.2m listeners in July 2013 and reported revenues of $427.1m (£272.3m) over the last financial year.